SPSS command language questions

ok.. this is an app not many here use (statistical applications).. SPSS ver 11.5

for reference the command reference manual (8 meg download) can be got from comunaware.com/pers/base.zip

try as I may I cannot find the assignment syntax to set a variable to the system missing value (this is represented by a .)

if I say

compute var1 =.

it complains correctly that . is the command terminator. and it doesnt like it if var1 is set to '.' which is a string type

my second question pertains to merging files (records with different variables across different files)
usually a merge is based on some key which is present in both files

but what if the following scenario is true:

Suppose there are 10 subjects, each with 100 lines (records) of data.
In another file I have one variable for each of the 10 subjects in 10 records (lines)

How do I merge the two files so that this new variable is repeated 100 times for each subject in the bigger data set ? assume that both files have the same ten unique subject numbers (this is repeated 100 times per subject in the first file)

these are trivial programming problems but unfortunately it is not clear how to coax SPSS command language to do this

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